The Language of Another World: A New Yorker in Munich

1.
Yesterday, for the first time since arriving in Munich 10 days ago, I successfully ordered a glass of water. This is much harder than it sounds. German waiters never offer you water with the menu, which means you have to order it; but make sure to ask specifically for tap water, or else they’ll pop open a bottle and expect you to pay. The major obstacle, of course, is how it’s pronounced. “A glass of water”: Leitungswasser. And that’s without the “Can I please have…?”

I mastered my latte order, but have nonetheless been dying of thirst. (Never mind that a glass of water always comes in what looks like a shot glass.) I even started bringing my very American aluminum water bottle to restaurants and trying to fit it under the tap in the bathrooms’ miniature sinks.

After a week of this, David, my boyfriend, who has been living in Munich for almost two years, made me practice “Can I have a glass of water please?” all the way to the café. “Ich hätte gern ein Leitungswasser bitte. Just keep repeating it,” he said as we trudged through the snow, laptops slung over our shoulders. “Lei-tungs-wasser. That’s how you’ll remember.”

I tried using a mnemonic device: “lie” then “tomb” then, with a British accent, “vase” — lie tombs vaaah-sa — but I kept picturing an Egyptian tomb with some tulips strewn about.

I grew up in Montreal speaking English and French, and, in high school and college, studied Spanish. German, in my view, is much harder than all of those languages combined — although David tells me this is not empirically true.

He is a linguist, which means that he has over 40 language and/or dictionary apps on his iPod Touch. He also knows more than his fair share of languages, and is always eager to pick up another. During our first conversation, I asked him how many he knew.

After a long silence, he finally said, “Twenty or 30?”

I gasped.

“But most of them are dead!”

He claims that English is the only language he can actually speak. This is modesty at its worst. He studies ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, and can communicate quite fluently in German, Chinese, Hebrew, and Spanish. After being in Munich for less than a year, he taught a linguistics course at the university in German. He’s currently teaching himself French and carries a pocket French-German phrasebook wherever he goes. If I leave the room, when I come back he has already figured out how to tell me, in perfectly accented, perfectly conjugated French, that Sarkozy has announced his bid for re-election. He can’t wait for our trip to Paris.

I’m still working on Wasser.

2.
I have come to Munich from New York to live with David while he finishes a post-doctoral fellowship at the Thesaurus linguae Latinae — the Latin equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary. David writes entries — or definitions — for Latin words, in Latin. The letter “A” was published in 1900. Right now, the team is working on both “N” and “R” — “Q” has been deemed too difficult and is being foisted on a future generation of scholars. When they completed “P,” in 2010, they had a party. The whole venture is supported by the Bavarian government.

“Who’s the dictionary for?” I asked him when he first told me about it.

“I think we’re writing it for God,” he said.

Since I’m a graduate student in the throes of thesis writing, I sublet my Brooklyn apartment, which I have lived in for 11 years, and flew over with a handful of books and a partially finished manuscript. We’ll go back to the city in June.

Back home, swimming breaks my day in half, so one of our first expeditions was to the local pool. Germans take their pools as seriously as New Yorkers take their gyms and yoga studios — they are open all day, every day. Our pool even has a tram stop named after it: Nordbad. The biggest pool was built for the 1972 Summer Games, and you can watch Olympic-caliber divers perform three or four beautiful flips off the highest platform. The first day I saw this, I immediately flashed to Greg Louganis cracking his skull open in Seoul.

If you think the Germans run their pools the way they run their trains, as I did, you would be wrong. Instead, imagine being dropped into a pen with dozens of people in blindfolds, swimming at each other.

Because I am a New Yorker this shocked me. During our inaugural visit, the chaos left me standing waist-deep in chlorine with my hands up in the air and my mouth ajar. Getting to the other end of the pool was like playing a game of chicken: who’s going to yield first?

I’ve been swimming in NYC pools for over six years (Red Hook remains my favorite), and order — signs: fast swimmers here, slow ones over there; and an agreed-upon system: let’s go up this side, down the other — is the only thing that keeps us from killing each other. When someone passes me without warning (by neglecting to tap my foot), causing a collision, I have more than once stopped and yelled out, “Really?!”

I don’t yet know how to say that in German, nor do I think it’s culturally acceptable. I’m left to muddle through.

During the day, the Nordbad is far less crowded. One wall is made up almost entirely of windows, so the space is doused in white winter light. The swimmers aren’t in a hurry. Young women swim side by side in pairs, chatting as they move leisurely through the breaststroke. They look like old friends on an early morning jog, minus the fanny packs. In a country where no one jaywalks and everyone pays (actually pays) for the subway on the honor system, the loosening of order here in the water is curious.

On the far end of the deck, down a few stairs and through thick plastic flaps of the kind you find at a New York deli, there is a massive outdoor hot tub. Because Europe is in the midst of a great freeze, thick clouds of mist hover and dance above the surface of the water, making it hard to see what company you’re keeping. Clearings reveal old ladies in shower caps doing water aerobics. Under the water, your body is hot, but the air slipping into your lungs is clear and extremely cold.

With language out of reach, it’s hard not to feel as if I’m in a dream, or that I’ve crossed over to another world. The buildings surrounding the tub on three sides are old — peach and yellow, with wrought-iron balconies — and coated in snow. I could have been in 19th-century Russia. Today it was snowing, so we drifted along with our bare shoulders under the water, snowflakes dissolving into our wet hair.

3.
When the tongue being spoken all around you is just a slew of unintelligible sounds — and the signs mere hieroglyphics — your own words seem to mean more, to fall more heavily to the page and into the air. Something about this unnerves me — do I really want what I say and what I write to resonate that loudly, to be the heavy stones that fall all the way to the bottom of the ocean and rest there?

Last month, a group of women between the ages of 25 and 35 got together in Los Angeles to talk about Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom. I was one of these women. I loved the idea of getting together to discuss a big book, one that people across the nation were also buying, and reading, and meeting to talk about. It felt like we were participating in a cultural moment–it was like getting a Cabbage Patch Kid in the 1980s. Plus, there would be snacks.

Since the novel is 562 pages, we decided to discuss the book over two meetings–crazy, I know. Because I actually get paid to facilitate a different book club (can you believe that?), I held back from planning questions and discussion points for this new one. I would not let this group become a job. I would not bring a highlighter. However, I did bring one quote, from Garth Risk Hallberg’sreview on this very site. To start the meeting off, I read the quote aloud to the others:
It is surely worth mentioning that Franzen writes more persuasively and attentively about the inner life of women than any male American novelist since Henry James.
“Who wrote that?” someone asked.
“What? You don’t think a man can write from a woman’s perspective?”
“Was the reviewer a man or a woman?”
“How does he know?”
“The question isn’t whether a man can write a woman’s perspective, but if Franzen can. Was he successful?”

The responses were mixed to this question. All of us felt Patty Berglund, midway through the novel at least, was a complicated and believable character, but a few of us–myself included–did not buy the conceit of her autobiography. It did not feel as if she had written it; arbitrarily capitalizing words does not render a perspective true! To me it felt half-assed, almost offensive. Why present these words as Patty’s, when they are really the author’s, barely concealing himself? It didn’t seem like a true investigation of a character’s world or her use of language to describe that world.

But I digress. We talked a whole lot about Patty.

“Why did Richard keep saying she was tall? She’s only like 5′ 9″!” (So said our tallest member.)
“Did anyone really imagine her as attractive?”
“When I think female basketball player, I’m unable to imagine a good looking woman.”

What’s interesting to me about an unguided book club is how quickly it dives into content, with only brief exchanges about form. There is analysis, but it’s about the characters. Why did Patty marry Walter? What is the nature of the love between Richard and Walter? What the hell was up with the dirty talk between Joey and Connie? (“That was my favorite part!”) The great fun of these meetings–and perhaps why they’re not particular productive–is that you get to talk about the characters as if they’re real. People describe emotional reactions to the events in the book. They make value judgments. They psychoanalyze the characters–and this inevitably pulls the discussion away from the text. I recall one moment, as we were debating the potential selfishness of the characters, when someone said, “Well, first, we need to define selfishness.” This led us down a thorny but fascinating path, which had little to do with the Berglunds and their problems. In a book club about Freedom, it’s easy to go from a discussion of Walter’s environmentalism to a discussion of overpopulation to a discussion of having babies to a discussion of orgasms to, “What do you think Jonathan Franzen’s lovemaking style is?” No wonder Franzen hemmed and hawed his way to a dis-invitation from Oprah nearly ten years ago! He understood how dangerous a group of women can be.

It turned out, after our first meeting (four hours long, no joke), we were all talked out. Our second meeting was shorter and more subdued. We discussed the ending, and the relative happiness of Patty and Walter. Had anyone changed? Could anyone really change? We discussed the structural and narrative similarities of the first and final sections–was that return to the elevated perspective beautiful, or a cop-out? (My answer? Both.) We talked about whether or not the sections about mountain top removal were sort of interesting or incredibly boring, and how we reacted to real-life details in fiction.

“You think Jonathan Franzen listens to Bright Eyes?”
“Is there a real life version of Richard Katz? I never believed he was actually famous.”
“What the fuck is up with the band name Walnut Surprise?”
“It was so silly!”
“Should have been Walnut Hotel or something.”
“Walnut Surprise sounds sexual, and scatological–like a Joey and Connie thing. Franzen is obsessed with poop.”

In both meetings, we came back to this question of whether or not Freedom is a masterpiece. Why was Jonathan Franzen, out of the many talented and important authors, the anointed one? We all agreed it was pretty great to see a writer on the cover of TIME, but was he truly “the great American novelist”? He is both commercially successful and critically acclaimed, and few can claim that mysterious combination these days. We were saddened, or sobered, by the fact that a woman, at least in the present day, would not be given that title. Everyone agreed with that.

Of course, we spent the last twenty minutes discussing the most important question: “What should we read next?”

I’ve never had a place bore as deeply into my consciousness as Flannery O’Connor’s home, Andalusia. It is a five-hundred acre dairy farm (now a museum) just outside of Milledgeville, Georgia. When I showed up there this summer, it was after a seven-year absence. I had been invited to the farm to read from my novel, A Good Hard Look, which features Flannery O’Connor as a character.

My first visit was in 2004. Flannery had just appeared in the novel; I kept telling myself that she might not stick around, that the crazy idea of dropping a Southern literary icon into my work was just a reckless phase I was going through. On the off chance that Flannery wouldn’t leave, I traveled to Georgia to do research. I’m from New Jersey, and had spent very little time in the South; there was no way I could write about Flannery O’Connor without seeing where she lived. My instinct on that visit was to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open. I walked all over her farm, and the tired, yet lovely, town. I sought out no scholars or relatives; I didn’t introduce myself to anyone. I passed myself off, easily and truthfully, as just another fan making a pilgrimage to the great author’s home.

My visit lasted thirty-six hours, and then I spent the next seven years back in New York City writing and re-writing across Andalusia’s terrain. The white farmhouse, the enclosed porch, the rocking chairs, the arrogant peacocks, the water tower in the distance—this became my alternate universe, a reality often more real than the urban neighborhood I lived in. My dreams frequently took place at Andalusia. Flannery glared and stamped her metal crutches against the porch floorboards; the cries of peacocks rattled my windowpanes. My conversations with my husband covered the same ground; we ended up discussing Flannery as if she were someone we actually knew, and Andalusia as a place we were familiar with. When I finished the novel—thankfully and painfully and finally—the idea of seeing Andalusia again, in person, meant something completely different to me than it had the first time.

In 2004, I had been nervous and diffident; in 2011 I was nervous and reverent. The first time, Flannery had been a stranger; now she had somehow become one of the main figures in my life. She was the reason why A Good Hard Look had taken seven years to write—it had taken that long to do her justice. I’d struggled to make my fictional Flannery believable, to make sure she rang true. My great fear was that my novel would insult the writer, and the Southern town she’d lived in. Eventually, after much effort, I managed to convince myself that I hadn’t. But that conviction had occurred while alone with my book in my New York City apartment; the novel was now published, and I was in the South. My first event had taken place the night before in Atlanta. I had read to and answered questions from a hundred Flannery fans, and I’d been deeply relieved to find the crowd appreciative and enthusiastic. Tonight’s event was the real test, though. I was at Flannery’s home, in a somewhat removed part of the state; I would be meeting people who had known Flannery personally. Men and women who were not only Flannery’s fans, but her intimates. This was the group best able to judge whether my Flannery was, in fact, up to snuff.

I showed up at the farm with shaking hands. I wore a blue dress I had carefully selected for its 1960s style. I couldn’t stop smiling, and I feared that I would cry (though I am generally not a crier). I was also sweating. It was July, and the South was in the middle of a heat wave. It was one hundred and six degrees in Milledgeville, Georgia at sunset. The executive director of Andalusia, a nice man named Craig, met me on the lawn. I had a hard time listening to his words—the farmhouse was right behind him, and there were peacocks in a large pen to my left and my heart was beating hard in my chest—but he had two key pieces of news to impart. (1) The farmhouse, where I would be doing my reading, did NOT have air conditioning, and (2) Flannery’s ninety-two-year-old cousin, Louise Florencourt, who was the executrix of Flannery’s estate, would be in attendance. He wanted to make me aware of this, he explained, because Ms. Florencourt had been a Harvard-educated lawyer, and she was known to be confrontational, even a tad cantankerous, on the subject of Flannery. In fact, her love of debate had only been exacerbated by her encroaching senility. Anything, he indicated—with admirable delicacy and politeness—was possible from this woman.

“Oh,” I said, while wondering if it was possible for one’s ears to sweat. I could have sworn that my ears had begun to sweat.

“I’ll give you a few moments to gather yourself before the event begins,” Craig said, and then, again with great delicacy, he disappeared into the house.

I stood still, and tried to regulate the crazy pinball that was ricocheting around my chest. I didn’t feel discouraged—perhaps I should have—but I didn’t. Scared silly, yes, but not discouraged. I told myself that being at Andalusia was worth being yelled at by a tempestuous elderly woman. I stared at the white farmhouse, and tried to channel some of Flannery’s famous nerve. I knew the writer would have savored this kind of evening; she would have responded to any critic with a witty remark and a small, amused smile. I’m not Flannery O’Connor, though, and the house and grounds stared back at me blankly; no nerve was on offer.

My attention was caught by a sudden movement to my left. A rattling noise filled the air. The peacock stood in the center of his pen, shaking his long, thin tail. When the shaking concluded, he hurled his feathers upwards. This violent motion created, all at once, a sweeping display of moons and eyes and cerulean blues and bright greens. The fan was easily four feet across, and dazzling. The peacock pointed the display at me in silence, his head averted. Only when he thought I’d admired him long enough, did his sharp eyes deign to meet mine. In the hundred-degree heat, I was swept with chills. For one singular moment, I could feel Flannery’s presence. She stood beside me on the lawn, and together we stared down her wondrous, obnoxious birds.

Inside, the small dining room was filling with an audience that could exist nowhere else. In attendance were three distinct groups: relatives of Flannery, neighbors of Flannery and local scholars of Flannery. The median age was, if I had to hazard a guess, seventy. I was introduced by the head of the English Department from the Georgia State College in Milledgeville. The gentleman was a noted Flannery scholar and so I listened at first with interest, and then increasing confusion, to his talk. He was discussing my novel and Flannery’s role in the book, but it was difficult to put a finger on his actual thesis. He’s definitely not praising the novel… he’s hedging, maybe? Surely not condemning? Oh wait, that was a barb. I think it was a barb. I can’t be sure… it’s too hot in here to be sure. Oh wait, he’s done. What a weird note to end on…

From the podium, the ninety-two-year old cousin was easy to spot. She sat in a large armchair in the back corner of the room. A shiny wooden cane rested against her leg. She wore a white bun; she looked regal and imposing. She was—it became immediately clear—glaring at me. She glared the entire time I spoke: during my introduction, when I tried to explain how this girl from New Jersey came to write Flannery into a novel; during my reading, which I decided to cut short due to the extreme heat. (I could see beads of sweat on peoples’ foreheads, and did I mention the median age? I feared that someone might pass out; I could imagine an ambulance arriving, and the local headline blaring, “BOOK READING SO BORING THAT PEOPLE LOSE CONSCIOUSNESS”.) Nothing, however—not the temperature nor my nervous blathering nor the excerpt from my novel—had any impact on Louise Florencourt’s glare. Her gaze was so fixed she appeared not to blink.

Reading from my novel was such a heady experience I forgot about Louise for a few minutes. The scene I had chosen was set at Andalusia, and showed the beginning of Flannery’s strange friendship with New York transplant Melvin Whiteson. The characters spoke on the porch that was only a few feet away from where I stood, and peacocks roamed the lawn that I could see out the window. It felt strange and almost miraculous to read my work in the home of one of the main characters—how many writers have that opportunity? When I finished, I took a deep breath before asking the audience if there were any questions. I was careful not to look anywhere near the lady in the back corner.

A man in the front raised his hand, announced that he had lived in Milledgeville his entire life and that I had made an error in the second chapter by suggesting that the town had no movie theatre in 1962. He nodded solemnly, to give his statement emphasis. “We’ve always had a movie theatre here.” I, of course, apologized.

Another elderly woman, also with cane, told me that I should have read her book while I was researching my own. She was Flannery’s neighbor, and she had written an entire chapter about the author. I said I was sorry I hadn’t come across it, and that I’d love to read it. The woman promptly handed me a bright yellow book and said, “My address is on the inside back cover—you can send a check for sixteen dollars to that address. That’s how much it costs.” I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

Craig, in the back of the room, shook his head ruefully. He told me later that he’d worried this lady was going to pull something like this; she was known to grab the microphone at public events in Milledgeville in order to push her self-published book on people.

Next, the history professor from the local college told me that he had figured out who, in Milledgeville, every character in the book was based on. I found this information—and the details he provided—both amusing and gratifying. The only characters I had based on anyone real were Flannery and her mother, so I chose to take this as some kind of compliment.

My final interlocutor was the youngest person in the room, a black-haired, clean-cut man of perhaps thirty. I’d been wondering what he was doing there; in a room full of characters, he didn’t fit. It turned out he had been sent down from Atlanta by his very wealthy, very Catholic boss to see if my book was worth optioning for a movie. His employer was slowly buying up Flannery’s short stories in order to put them on the screen; he saw this project as a kind of Catholic philanthropy, rather than a money-making venture. The young man looked me over, with what appeared to me to be skepticism, while we talked.

At some point, without my noticing, Louise Florencourt abandoned her glare and her corner seat. She left the farm without saying a word to me. Craig posited that it was because she hadn’t read my novel, so didn’t feel she had the necessary facts for an effective verbal attack. I was enormously relieved; if she had attacked me, the argument would have been one-sided. I would have let her have her say without interruption. Louise had, after all, grown up with Flannery; they were family. She felt an understandable ownership of the great writer, and the disapproval she had pointed in my direction made sense. I’d fictionally usurped someone she knew, and loved. If I’d written a bad biography of Flannery, Louise Florencourt could have—and probably would have—sued me. But a novel is not biography; it is mere make-believe, a piece of whimsy, an imaginative fugue, and therefore untouchable. I had pulled Flannery out through a trap door Louise didn’t have access too, and might even doubt existed. A novel must represent the ultimate frustration and insult to someone like Ms. Florencourt, who had made her living fighting facts with facts. I had not only taken her cousin away, I had taken her tools as well.

It was my turn to feel untouchable as I left that house for the second, and perhaps the last, time. The peacock was tucked in the shadows now, his tail matted down, his eyes looking away. The night was steamy, the crickets and birds clattered in the trees over my head. I had written onto this landscape the clatter of typewriter keys and the screams of fowl, the gunning of car engines and the spill of blood. I had written about a woman who lived here, and lived fiercely, in the face of certain death. I had lived here with her, with my pages and words, for many years. The truths I had tried to capture in my book, and the truths Flannery had nailed in hers, swirled around me in the noisy darkness.

The event was over and I was alone, but my hands continued to shake at my sides. I was smiling, too; I may have even laughed out loud. I found myself thinking that the night had been a great success. It had been weird and crazy and stressful, yes, but this was Flannery O’Connor’s house, and as such it was only proper that the weird and crazy should rise to the surface. The worst thing that could have happened was for the evening to be ordinary. “Ordinary” was an insult to Flannery O’Connor. “Ordinary” had no life in it, no electrical charge, and therefore had no place here.

What a delightful (and educational) piece. I hope you figure out why the Germans allow chaos in their pools, but line up and pay their fares properly. Is David preparing to be a spy, even if he doesn’t realize it?

Loved your story and learning of the unexpected German approach to swimming (they would have a tough time in the Toronto Y pool). You have a good eye for detail. All the best, to you and David who I have yet to meet.

From an Irish person living in Germany, the sign translates as, ‘Clean your body throughly first, even if you were just at home in the shower.’

Also, the German word for ‘really’ is ‘wirklich’, but in your situation, you could’ve just shouted, ‘Was machst du?’ – ‘What are you doing?’

By the way, ordering tap water here is completely uncommon. I’m not one for bullshit social conventions – and I encourage you to do what you like – but if you keep doing this, you’ll get some rude and strange looks!

On the wall behind her, a sign informs me that this is “food with integrity.” A dozen meat strips sizzle on the open stove; Chipotle’s chicken, boasts another sign, “is raised without antibiotics and fed a diet free of animal by-products.”

Book Expo is a massive event. The floor is crowded with publishers hawking their wares. There’s acres and acres of books. It’s quite an operation really. But whether intentionally or by design, the folks behind the Expo are making it pretty tough to cover this event, especially if you’re a blogger. As Sarah and Ed have mentioned, there is almost no Internet access. Supposedly you can pay $5 an hour for wireless access, or the incredible price of $50 for the day. Everyone is subject to this charge, even those who have press passes. There is a press room (which is where I am right now), but there’s no wireless access there either. Instead there’s three computers with signs posted above them that say “Please limit your time to 15 minutes when others are waiting.” It makes it hard to blog, is all.